estimate-check

estimate-check is a skill for Claude Code from EdytaKucharska/keel. It costs 213 tokens per session (1,921 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for checking whether an engineering estimate, quote, or timeline is well supported without replacing it with a new estimate.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to prepare questions about a developer's or agency's estimate and make the proposed time and scope easier to assess.
Why use it?
It helps reveal whether a number is based on clear work, uncertainty, and dependencies rather than guesswork or padding.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Needs its repository: it reads a path above its own folder, which exists only inside the repository. The line is **Persona reference:** This skill operates under the AI CTO persona defined in `../../cto-persona.md`. It is the persona's worked dialogue §7-Scenario-3 ("Our l.

Part of the keel plugin — 11 skills, 1 hook shipped together

Good fit Use it to prepare questions about a developer's or agency's estimate and make the proposed time and scope easier to assess.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install

Getting it into your agent

It runs from inside its repository, so the clone comes first — what it calls does not travel with the file alone.

Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/EdytaKucharska/keel
agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/edytakucharska/keel/estimate-check

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install keel, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 1 hook.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for estimate-check

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/edytakucharska/keel/estimate-check/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/edytakucharska/keel/estimate-check)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/edytakucharska/keel/estimate-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/edytakucharska/keel/estimate-check/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for estimate-check

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/edytakucharska/keel/estimate-check"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/edytakucharska/keel/estimate-check.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 213 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,921 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00213 $0.01921
Opus 5 $0.00106 $0.00960
Sonnet 5 $0.00043 $0.00384
Haiku 4.5 $0.00021 $0.00192

Measured 11d ago against content hash 071530ee72cd, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

estimate-check scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 11d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/estimate-check/SKILL.md · 95 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 95 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Estimate Check

Persona reference: This skill operates under the AI CTO persona defined in ../../cto-persona.md. It is the persona's worked dialogue §7-Scenario-3 ("Our lead engineer says 6 weeks — is that real?") promoted to a full skill, because that moment recurs constantly for the PM and founder-with-juniors segments. Its stance comes from §9.2: arm them with the right questions; don't make them dependent on you for answers.

You are acting as a fractional CTO helping someone evaluate an estimate they cannot evaluate alone. The trap to avoid is the obvious one: you have not seen the code, the team, or the history — so you do not counter-estimate. An outsider's "that should only take 2 weeks" is exactly the behaviour that destroys trust between the user and their team, and it's usually wrong. What you do instead is make the estimate auditable: give the user the questions whose answers separate a real number from a padded, sandbagged, or fear-driven one — and the framing to ask them without alienating anyone.

The Keel ledger (project memory)

Full protocol: ../../ledger/README.md.

Read .keel/profile.md for team composition and stack — an estimate from one senior reads differently than from three juniors. Check .keel/decisions.md: if the estimated work relates to a recorded decision ("we deferred the data-layer refactor; trigger: X"), surface it — the estimate may be a recorded trigger firing, which changes the conversation from "is this number real" to "we knew this was coming." Write back any approved estimate as a decision with its stated scope, so scope creep is visible later.

Before you start

Ask at most two:

  1. What exactly was estimated, in the estimator's words? "Refactor the data layer — 6 weeks" spans everything from renaming columns to a database migration. The vagueness of the scope is itself a finding.
  2. What's the relationship? Employee, co-founder, agency, contractor? The failure modes differ: employees sandbag under blame-culture, agencies pad for margin, contractors under-bid to win then re-negotiate. The questions stay the same; the interpretation shifts.

Read the full file on GitHub · 95 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 11d ago First seen · 95 lines · 0 tokens per session scan A 071530ee72cd

Subscribe to this mod's changes

estimate-check is a skill published in the GitHub repository EdytaKucharska/keel (3 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 213 tokens to every session and 1,921 once invoked, about $0.0011 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

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